


Recovery

by samalander



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Angst, Depression, F/M, Hallucinations, Hospitals, Injury, Recovery, h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-20
Updated: 2010-04-20
Packaged: 2017-11-07 21:35:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/435700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samalander/pseuds/samalander
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a hard road to recovery after the Narada, and Chris Pike needs a little help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recovery

**Author's Note:**

> The article One reads to Pike is [here](http://www.chrisreevehomepage.com/200902-recovery-report.pdf).

When he wakes up, Pike is confused. He sees color, in a place he will later decide is his window, and knows it is fall. He has just given his ship, his lovely ship, to a bunch of kids and he is so drugged all he can remember is blue eyes and being moved.

The chair. He can't walk. It comes rushing back and he makes a noise that, from a lesser man, would be a whimper.

There is a calming voice, in his ear. "Chris, Chris. I'm here."

Groggily, he reaches out to the voice, and feels her smooth hands engulf his. "You've been hurt, Chris," she murmurs, lithe fingers pressing into his palm. "You were a prisoner. Do you remember?"

He remembers. He remembers the searing pain, the severing of nerves, the all-encompassing darkness. And he remembers her face, her voice, pulling him through it.

He squints up towards her, eyes struggling to focus. "Number One," he coughs. "You real?"

She laughs, and it is heavenly. It is life, it is manna, it is all things he needs. "Yes, sir. As real as you need."

He sighs then, and feels the drugs take hold again as his consciousness begins to drift, like leaves in the fall air.

* * *

She is there in the days to come, always quietly on the edge of his vision. He doesn't speak, and she doesn't either. Just sits, and reads or hums or watches him. It makes him mad and he doesn't know why.

"I'm not broken," he says. It is mid-November in San Francisco and outside wind rushes off the bay in cold spurts. It makes Chris miss home, miss the dryness of the air, miss the soaring hot days and the frigid nights. Here everything is wet and bright and cold.

She smiles at him. "You've never been broken, Chris."

He knows that, but sometimes he is back on the ship, surrounded by laughing faces with black ink smeared across them. He watches them prep the bug, sharpen their knives, touch themselves. Every torture they could devise, they used. He was ready, when Kirk came. Ready to die for the Federation. He tells her that.

"You've always been ready to die for it," she says softly. "You always put it first."

He knows what passes unspoken in those works. _Before me_ , mostly. But also _Before yourself, before your health, before your family._ And it's not untrue.

* * *

She tells him, in December, the story of his rescue. Kirk sending Spock out on the future-ship, and coming to find him. Him pulling Kirk's phaser from its holster and shooting the Romulan. He doesn't remember that. He wonders if Kirk made it up, to make Pike sound like the hero. He decides it doesn't matter. Who needs a hero without legs?

* * *

One is impassive. It's been so long since she first came to him, and she never speaks first. She waits. He goes in for surgery after surgery, nerve repairs and organ replacements and keeping his spine connected with hot glue and a prayer. But she is always waiting when he gets back.

He has learned to hate time, because there are apparently wounds it doesn't heal. As advanced as medical technology is, there is no guarantee that he'll ever walk again, no promise that he'll ever be _whole_. One tells him that wholeness is in the spirit, not the body, but he doesn't even know what that means.

* * *

In February, after months of surgeries and sleep and the crushing boredom of Fleet paperwork - form 324-F for medical disability incurred while in the line of duty, form 215-P for indefinite medical leave, form 45-R for promotion to Admiral - they take him to physical therapy.

One's daughter, Christine, is a nurse. Not his nurse, she's out on a ship, but she's visiting now and she tells him all the things that will be obstacles. "You've been in that bed for three months. Your leg muscles have atrophied. You've forgotten how they work. It's going to be slow, and painful. Growing pains, almost. But Uncle Chris," she smiles and he thinks, not for the first time, of suicide, "If anyone can make this, anyone can pull through, it's you."

He hates her in that moment, and waits for the feeling to pass. It does. Slowly.

* * *

The journey towards his new first steps is the most painful things he's even done. They tell him he's lucky that most of the damage is in the lumbar sacral area, and he's only really hurt from the waist down. A little higher and he could be facing breathing difficulties, loss of his arms. He doesn't feel lucky. He'll feel lucky if he can control his bladder again, doesn't need to piss in a tube. But he works anyway. Because the alternate isn't something he can handle.

* * *

They stick him in a group. A bunch of old Fleeters, sitting around talking about their prosthesis or their injuries. He listens at first, captain's reflexes taking over, making him want to help these people. But as time wears on into the second, third, fourth, tenth sessions, he shuts down. He can't handle their pain on top of his.

In the third week - 21 days into a group that meets four times a week - the leader calls him out.

"Admiral Pike?" He's a young man, probably 30 seconds out of the academy, wearing science blue. "Will you talk today?"

Chris rolls his eyes. "Talk about what?"

"How are you feeling?"

"I'm not feeling much of anything below the waist."

The young man nods, and the vet next to Pike pats him on the arm. "I hate Romulans," Pike continues, not sure why he's talking. Everyone is looking at him. He feels powerful for the first time since the Narada, in control of this small group, this small crew. "I hate what they did to me. I hate what they did to the Fleet and to Vulcan and-" he chokes a little, suddenly realizing that he has tears on his face.

"Admiral?"

"I want to be a real person again."

The words echo in the small room. The men and women around him look angry, look sad, look pitying. He wants to storm out, but it's hard to do that when most of your movement is achieved by wheels. Wheels you're not even good at using yet.

"What does that mean?" the young officer asks, making a note on his PADD.

"I want to walk and run and jump and fucking kill those fuckers. I know they're dead, One told me so. But it's not _fair_."

The words sound, even to Pike, like petulance. Like childishness. Fairness and right and wrong - what are those, anymore?

The Blue Officer, as Pike calls him, gives an answer. Something about stages of grieving and getting used to things the way they are and time. Later, lying with him in his bed, One says things about coping and learning to live and love. He holds her close and tries not to let her know he's crying again. But she knows. She always knows.

* * *

Six months is creeping up on Pike.

Six months, the doctors check their charts, they cluck over him. He's making progress, but it's slow and it's agonizing. Six months.

One reads him an article she found, one he's read a thousand times.

_Patients with SCI are often told that improvement or recovery occurs largely in the first 6 months after injury and is complete by 2 years. Indeed, the literature does not provide a single example of an individual with an ASIA Grade A SCI who recovered by more than one grade 2 years after injury_.

She looks at him in askance.

"It means," he tells her, "That people with Grade A paralysis, like me, with no feeling, no movement, if we don't get better fast, we don't get better. Not much. Sometimes we get feeling back, but not movement. Almost never movement. And most progress- if I was going to be walking, it would be going faster. I don't think-" he coughs, hoping she won't hear the crack in his voice.

She drops the PADD and crawls up next to him in bed, draping one arm over his shoulder.

"You know I'll still love you, right?" She asks, her lips bare centimeters from his.

He nods and rests his forehead against hers. "You know what I would give to make love to you right now, One?"

She smiles. "You love me however you can, Chris, and I'll be happy."

He thinks about telling her how much he needs her, how much he loves her, how important she is, but the words don't come. All he has is her blue, blue eyes and her silky voice.

* * *

The winter is over and spring half gone, when the doctors tell Chris he can go home.

He looks at them blankly. Home is his ship. Home is the universe. Home isn't a place one goes when one is in a wheelchair.

He takes the transport they send to his house, wondering if he'll ever drive himself anywhere again. He's not going to walk, they know that now.

There are things for people like him, he knows that. Ways to drive, to move. It isn't the 20th century anymore. People are only limited by what they can learn.

But Chris feels like an old dog, and he doesn't know how many new tricks he has left.

* * *

One doesn't come around after he's home. Life falls into a rhythm- get up, get in the chair, do exercises, go to headquarters and work. It continues that way, and each day her absence burns at him.

She doesn't answer communications, doesn't return calls. Chris starts to wonder if he's done something wrong.

In desperation, in August, he comms Christine. She grins at him across a time-delay.

"Admiral Uncle Chris!"

"Christine. How are you?"

They exchange pleasantries, chatter a bit, before he has the nerve to ask.

"Chrissy, I haven't seen your mother for a while. Have you heard from her?"

Christine's face falls. She looks like someone has reached out and pumped all the happiness out of her.

"Uncle Chris," she says, so gently he wants to scream. "You know where she is."

Chris shakes his head. No, he doesn't. The silence stretches out like a warp jump, white-hot stars bending around them.

"She was captain of the _Farragut_."

It rushes into him then, months of pain suddenly becoming insurmountable. The wreckage as they came out of warp, the knowledge that One was gone. The decision to go meet her killers. The crushing truth of his own demise.

For almost a year, the Fleet has been after him to explain himself, let them understand why he went over to the Narada. He hasn't had a reason until now.

_because i didn't care anymore_

Christine is asking if he's okay, if she should call anyone. He waves her off and says his goodbyes, flips his console off and leans back in his chair. His fucking chair. Pike closes his eyes and reaches out, like he did that first morning in the hospital. No hand reaches back and he lets out a noise that, for any man, could be called agony.

And in months of rehab, anger, hate, denial, he knows. He knows that finally, the fucking Romulans have broken him.

And he doesn't care anymore.


End file.
